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ebaines Posts: 10,055, Reputation: 5539
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#2

Jul 7, 2008, 02:38 PM
Start by breaking the problem in two - consider the components of the forces in the horizontal direction seprarately from the components of the forces in the vertical direction. You want to have and . The 600N force that goes up to the left has a horizontal component of 600N * (-4/5) (note that its sign is negative as it goes to the left), and a vertical component of 600N * 3/5. The 400N force going up to the right has a horizontal component of 400N * cos(30), and a vertical componenet of 400* sin(30). The unknown force has a horizontal component of and a vertical component of . So summing all the horizontal forces and setting that equal to 0 yields:



From this you can determine the value for .

Then sum the forces in the vertical direction:



This gives you . The value of can then be found from:


And the direction of is:

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